Abstract As the urgency for climate action heightens, local governments and stakeholders are developing pathways towards deep decarbonization at the local level and committing to community-wide greenhouse gas reductions of 80–100% by 2050 or earlier. Urban areas are the largest place-based source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 71%–76% of global emissions. Local governments have direct and indirect control of over a significant proportion of emissions that occur within their municipalities. However, there remains a gap in knowledge about the local technical and policy pathways that are being developed in order to achieve deep decarbonization and how these pathways vary for different size cities. This study qualitatively analyzes eight local government deep decarbonization plans of cities that range in size from eight thousand to nine million people. We analyze emerging patterns among the cities, while also considering the impacts of the population size and the national context. Each city has unique circumstances and priorities when it comes to decarbonization, and not all cities prioritize their highest emitting sectors for decarbonization. We find that emerging technical pathways to deep decarbonization focus on five priority sectors (electricity, buildings, transportation, waste, and carbon sinks and storage), but also that several local governments are developing innovative strategies beyond what is described in the literature for decarbonizing the priority sectors within their jurisdiction and are expanding the scope of their plans to include emerging areas in GHG mitigation such as scope 3 and embodied greenhouse gas emissions.